April 23, 2017

OUR dEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT:

First, the notion that American companies should be forced to hire American labor is a conceit of the Left. It is based on the same failures of economic understanding that lead to advocating higher minimum wages: the notion that cramming through an increase in labor cost does not cost jobs to a company, does not raise costs to the consumer, and does not degrade the quality of future products.

Yet Trump and other protectionists such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Ann Coulter have long seen H-1B visas -- supposedly high-tech visas allowing workers to enter the United States to fill jobs for domestically based companies -- as a great bugaboo. There are certainly significant problems with the current administration of H-1B visas: Michelle Malkin has rightly pointed out that there are those who falsely sponsor immigrants to the United States without any intention of employing them. And she is also right to criticize the H-1B lie that workers from abroad never replace American workers, and the inflated claim that there is a serious shortage of Americans qualified to fill jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM jobs). Other valid critiques of H-1B visas are that they tie visa-holders to jobs and give employers total leverage over them.

But there is a broader ideological critique that is simply false: the notion that America benefits as a country by heavily restricting its labor base rather than by expanding the pool of qualified applicants.